Fusion-io Announces ioDrive Duo, Offers 1,500MB/s Read Speeds

Posted on March 12, 2009 9:55 AM by Rob Williams

If there’s no shortage of one thing, it would be solid-state news. Just earlier this week, we linked to a story that showed crafty Samsung employees playing around with 24 SSD drives in RAID, and the end result was without question, impressive. The problem with a setup like that, though, is the bulk… 24 SSDs won’t fit in a chassis, and it would look awful cluttered hanging out of one. So what is the next-best thing?

Well it might be the ioDrive Duo, by Fusion-io. This is a company we’ve talked about a few times in our news section already, and for good reason. The company seemingly came out of nowhere, but their products are incredibly fast, and as far as I’m aware, they are the first ones to actually release an SSD based on a PCI-E card. Their Duo brings things to the next level though, and almost matches the insane 24 RAID setup we saw just the other day.

For Read bandwidth, you’ll get about 1500MB/s, and for Write, you’ll see 1400MB/s. To put it into real perspective, with this drive, you could copy a full DVD movie (~4.5GB) from one part of the drive to another, in around ~3.2 seconds. That’s insane speed. For IOPS measurements, the drive boasts 186,000 Read and 167,000 Write, in 4k packet sizes. Not surprisingly, pricing is not mentioned, but you can be assured it’s going to be well over $10,000 when it launches this spring.

Based on PCI Express x8 or PCI Express 2.0 x4 standards, which can sustain up to 20 gigabits per-second (Gbytes/sec) of raw throughput, the ioDrive Duo has more than enough bandwidth to obtain industry-leading performance from a single card. The ioDrive Duo can easily sustain 1.5 Gbytes/sec of read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS.